The present invention relates in general to a method for loading digital data from a storage medium, such as an optical disc.
Recently, a wide variety of optical disc format, such as CDs, VCDs, SVCDs and DVDs, have become popular. Digital versatile discs (DVDs) are the most popular because they allow selection of any audio/video segment recorded thereon. The disc player can identify the physical position of the selected audio/video segment and immediately play the selection, thus eliminating time spent searching for the desired content.
To provide playback control, a conventional DVD player must load navigation data, comprising pointers to each audio/video segment, in its entirety into data memory after an audio/video segment is selected. The navigation data comprise complete video manager information (VMGI), video title set information (VTSI), program chain information (PGCI), playback control information (PCI) and data search information (DSI).
In addition, a conventional DVD player must load all navigation data for different audio/video segments into data memory thereof. Since the amount of memory occupied by the navigation data for each individual audio/video segment is different, dynamic allocation of memory inevitably results in fragmentation of data memory space and the utilization efficiency of data memory space is therefore decreased.